Again and again it comes back to a single core issue: self-loathing government. Australia, with coal-export CO2 larger than the whole of Germany’s, faces the G7 this weekend as a global emissions pariah. Electric vehicles are an easy part of the remedy. But take-up is microscopic. Why? Because we wallow in an abject policy vacuum. Because when government no longer believes in governing, true leadership becomes impossible.

When government worships only corporate gods; when it thinks strong governance involves kissing up and kicking down, when in the same week it toadies to the mining lobby and denies a desperately ill three-year-old medical treatment for political reasons, it’s all over.

Many aver we need a federal ICAC. But when our federal government mopes in its pink, poster-covered bedroom wishing to be a blustering tycoon when it grows up it doesn’t have to be corrupt, because it has been ideologically corrupted.

Electric vehicles are a no-brainer. Everyone’s talking zero carbon by 2050. Even Scott Morrison inches this way. But when the PM told mining executives last week that we’ll take “the Frank Sinatra approach” to net-zero, we’ll “do it our way in Australia”, it was clear what he meant. Do nothing.

Scott Morrison likes to invoke the “animal spirits of capitalism”. The phrase, from Hobbes, Emerson, Austen and others, was made famous by Maynard Keynes. Morrison uses it to offer pagan flattery – as if business leaders in Perth or Sydney were our fierce tribes of Viking warriors – while casting capitalism as a natural force, benevolent and sacrosanct. Capitalism, the suggestion goes, will take us to zero emissions with no help from government.

This, no doubt, is “our way”. It’s the lazy-as-she-goes approach, like digging up coal and selling it, like watching TV with a tinnie and calling that sport. It’s “she’ll be right, mate”. But will she?

Transport produces some 19 per cent of Australia’s emissions. EVs reduce this by around 40 per cent, even if the electricity is from coal. If it’s renewable, then emissions fall to zero.

True, they’re still cars, and the car has other attendant downsides. Even EVs worsen sprawl, devour farmland, destroy community, nurture ego and coarsen perception. But unless we truly think Australia can cold-turkey its car-addiction, EVs must be top of our to-do list. Will the market take us there?

Many brands are now available and driving range is up to 400 kilometres. In the US, EV popularity is huge, with Ford reporting 45,000 orders for its new F-150 Lightning all-electric ute within 48 hours of release. Here, EVs sit at a meagre 0.75 per cent, and take-up is dropping.